February 23, 2004

Epilogue

The MP3s are now gone, and so the 31 Songs project is officially put to bed. I found it a very interesting exercise in writing, and I hope that all who read it enjoyed it.

It intrigues me that as the writer, what I get from the project is very different from that which the reader gets. For me, the project is all about the writing: choosing the songs; finding something to write about each of the songs, there was an obvious topic for only a quarter of the songs I chose; keeping to a strict deadline, something with which I had only limited success. For the reader, the content itself is key. This essential difference in what each party gains is explored in some depth by Kevin Kelly.

There are two main insights that I gained into my writing. One is the need to restrict the number of components to a piece. That often, less is more. Just because I can find a number of strands or directions for a particular topic, I shouldn't include them all. I was often pleasantly surprised to end up with a completely different post to that which I'd envisaged at the beginning, when an aside became more attractive than the main theme and so replaced it.

The other insight was the amount of time writing can consume. With hindsight, it was ridiculous to believe that I could write thirty-one articles in twenty days (the aim was to be finished before I headed North for Christmas) in addition to everything else I normally do. As a result, the 31 Songs was almost all I did in December, at the expense of any progress in my own software development. So, whilst a very enjoyable exercise, it showed that my blogging needs to take a lower priority, at least for now.